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Chapter 21: The Beginning of the End
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2020-08-17 08:37:49With all his work finally caught up on, Emmet was free to follow his regular schedule. Jasper, after his morning physiotherapy session joined him after lunch for his lab shift.
Emmet wore his white lab coat, white goggles, white mask, and white gloves, all non-disposable to be washed and reused. Jasper didn't wear any of it, just simply perching on his seat in the corner of the room, back straight against the wall. His eyes were narrowed and honed in on the movements of Emmet's hands.
The screen behind him lit up with the slides that Emmet placed under the electron microscope. The prepared samples from the day prior showed the buckminsterfullerenes with the antigens placed inside them. The poison had been picked, and the final review of the separate mechanisms and construction of each moving part was due by next week. After, the assembly and the assembly review, testing would formally begin.
Emmet was not informed who, but he suspected any prisoners of war and p
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Jasper knew that he was beyond repenting. His contributions to the Sýnnefa Empire were made under the treat of death, but it was undeniable that he had played his part well, acting meek, pathetic, twitchy, scared and antisocial. He had given Sýnnefa technology that they could use to quash many other countries, killing millions, if they so choose, repeating the destruction of his community thousands of times on any scale as they so pleased.He remembered.He remembered where the name Sýnnefa came from. In Emmet's arms, enveloped by that soothing golden light, he felt Emmet shiver, as if he was cold, dark, and lonely. Jasper finally remembered then and there where the name Sýnnefa came from, and he had no choice but to hold on tighter to Emmet.Sýnnefa, a tiny, nondescript island off the coast of a no-name country going to some war in some place and being destroyed as a warning. The people of the island, reportedly innocent civil
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It was an otherwise innocuous room where the time machine was kept. It was a small, quiet storage room not too far away from the lab that Emmet and Jasper were previously in. The light inside hadn't been working for months, but Emmet hadn't cared enough to change it. The light from the corridor was more than enough, no matter what Doctor Johnstone liked to say to him. He could always reply that the roof wasn't leaking and that there were no rats. He sometimes wondered what her reaction to Minnie's garage would be, with all its tiny, metal pieces strewn out on the floor, with the only organisational system present was her scratching lines into the floor, creating separate zones for separate projects, with random rocks from outside.Aunt Minnie would either be bouncing off the walls with the opportunity he had been given or would have her hands clamped around Jasper's shoulders to make sure that he wouldn't run away before she had finished interrogating him. He remembered back
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When their little lesson was done, Emmet delivered Jasper back to the common room for supper, citing the need to finish his work to go back to his office.There had been no sent messages from the facility apart from his own. He wouldn't be able to check the security cameras without citing a very good reason. He was trying to keep Jasper's existence a secret, and it wouldn't do for him to draw any unnecessary attention.There was no way for him to smooth over his relations with Lisa, especially when she had Alice. He could certainly rely on her for more than a few things, but he wouldn't truly know when she would stop doing supporting him.She had to know his reasoning for taking this position, and sparing her. He wouldn't expect Alice to understand the situation and circumstances, but Lisa had to understand. She had been with him for so long, heard all his secrets and insecurities. She had to understand why he couldn't say no, especially when the offer came from
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"Hey Red_Two, how was your day?" Alice asked, bounding over to sit next to him, with Doctor Johnstone taking his other side.Richard was stood at the oven this time, crouched down staring into the black filtered gold light as multiple rectangle trays spun around inside. Jasper could see why the man wasn't moving his eyes away from the seen, the spinning food inside did look beautiful, and it was quite easy to get lost in the motions of their dance."It was alright," Jasper mumbled out, not wanting to look away from the entrancing food.This was actually quite enjoyable. A mealtime with colourful beanbags behind him, a glowing gold oven, all sorts of technicolour mugs in the most bizarre of patterns. Alice had chosen another neon coloured mug for herself, decorated with birthday balloons with neon coloured smiles plastered all over it, even though Jasper knew that it wasn't her birthday. He may not be sure how birthdays were celebrated in the past, but he was sur
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"You don't need to keep hanging back, holding yourself to fit a certain mould, you know,"It was Doctor Johnstone. She had kept her seat next to him, as all the others had begun migrating back to the common room. She sat idly next to him, her eyes tracing Alice's movements, as she fluttered from person to person, eager and welcome in every conversation, bouncing off the walls and having fun, laughing, giggling and sending beaming smiles over in their direction, Doctor Johnstone waving back to her, giving her own smiles, over the rim of her mug."It's not that. It's just hard to relate to this experience. All my meals before here were silent," Jasper explained, knowing he had to be careful."Are you happy here?" she asked back, taking another swig of her mug, leaning back on the table, relaxed, with slow blinks."Yeah…"It was all Jasper could say. He was happy here. But to make sure that these people would live, he needed to leave and spare
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The morning afterwards, Jasper did not get to see Emmet. Doctor Johnstone met him at breakfast, brought him to her office for his physiotherapy, and then back to his room. She did not speak to him as she ferried him back from her office.Her body was relaxed, and was unhurried, as she walked behind him back a few doors down into his room. Before she left him alone, she turned around and asked him," Would you like any books to read?"Jasper froze."Do you have any on… um, uh, colour theory," Jasper managed to get out.That was a perfectly innocent topic.She left the room as soon as that sentence left his mouth, clicking the door closed behind her.Jasper waited in silence, heart pounding. What was going on? Why was she telling him not to leave the room? Was the door going to be locked? What was happening with Emmet? What had happened while he was asleep?Nothing bad happened at breakfast. Emmet was absent, as he always was in e
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The hallway was empty.It was painfully empty.He wanted Emmet to appear out from around the corner, from one of the rooms, from the window, over fifty metres from the sea level.The corridor floor was grey. The walls were white, and there were lights on the ceiling. The windows let in streams of gold, and the awesome blue of an azure ocean.It was too quiet.Nobody met him on his hobbling, horrible trip. There was no life. Only the corridor, sun, sea, sky, and himself.He was mostly dead.The storage cupboard wasn't even that far away from the medical wing, just opposite the labs where Emmet spent his afternoons. The door was unlocked, like it had been months, but was still extremely heavy, like every steel block, two metres tall, was, no matter if it was somewhat hollow on the inside and insulated.Jasper grinded his molars, pushing the door inwards, sweating through his medical gown, and his eyes snapping shut in his animali
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The whole room flooded with burning, bright light.Jasper sealed his eyes shut away from it, and fell against the shelves, before pushing the crutches back to balance himself, skidding anyway. He whipped his head over to Emmet and saw him, stood above the man in the suit with a giant block covered over with a plastic sheet.What had Jasper done? What had he driven Emmet to do? How had he let this happen?This was his fault.He gulped and pulled himself back up to standing and watched Emmet pant and reach up to pull the time machine down. He ripped off the over and cradled it to his chest.Jasper made his way over and reached out towards the device stroking. His vision blurred and choked down a sob. The surface on the top was scratched all over, while the face remained unchanged, and the exact same, despite its delicacy.It was in Emmet's hands. Emmet, who had just battered a man for him.This was his fault.He had done this. He
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“Why’re you sleeping on the floor like that? Come on, get up. You’ll hurt your back doing that,” Doctor Marigold chided, dragging all her bits of heavy machinery around the office space to prepare for her demonstration.Behind her, Lila remained still.“I know that you’re not dead. Come, get up already,” she called out, stepping over a few sheets of paper that she had laid out to grab Lila by the shoulder and heave her up into sitting.The stubborn girl just flopped down again, not opening her eyes.“If you get the fuck up, we can move the flight a week forward so you can stop worrying about it,” Lucy Marigold shouted across the room.Like a rubber band, Lila snapped back up and finally opened her eyes.It had been harder to see the bags below them when they had been closed and Doctor Marigold wondered if she should buy the girl some sleep tablets.“I’m awake,” Li
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“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now again!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now keep on going!”Lila landed each punch, timing her breaths to the count as she moved her fists, dodging underneath the swing that came towards her head, before blocking the second hit that came to her and moving along with the force of the fist that hit her arm.The swinging punching bag forced distance between Lila and Tweedle Dum, and she stepped back to where she was stood before, within the path of the moving bad, to put more distance between him and her.“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”Lila punched the bag once more, landing all of her hits.“Okay, time for a break,” Tweedle Dum announced, grabbing the punching bag and pulling it back to him as Lila moved away from the centre of the room, sitting down on one of the rickety plastic chairs at the side of the room.She took of
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